Obamacare: The National Health ID Card

What’s in Obamacare, part 7: The National Health ID Card

National Health Care Identification Card:

The bill explicitly states that in order for any individual to be eligible for a health insurance plan and health claim status, they will be issued a machine readable national health identification card. All operating rules set forth in the bill for health plan and claim eligibility must allow for the use of this ID card.

“ELIGIBILITY FOR A HEALTH
PLAN AND HEALTH CLAIM STATUS.
—The set of operating rules for eligibility for a
health plan and health claim status transactions shall be adopted not later than
July 1, 2011, in a manner ensuring that such operating rules are effective not later
than January 1, 2013, and may allow for the use of a machine readable identification card.”

-H.R. 3590 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Page 62

This national health identification card is similar to the Danish national health ID card. It’s just another little trick the federal government will use to render the population manageable.

You have misunderstood this provision. This ID card issue was first discussed during the first Bush administration (by then Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis Sullivan). It then was incorporated intothe Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. The regulation calling for this was never promulgated. The ID card discussed in HR 3590 is part of an industry-wide effort to standardize the medical claims processing system and is endorsed by not only health care providers, but also health plans. The card would only contain what is currently on the paper card, but by having it machine-readable, would result in billion of dollars in savings (go to http://www.swipeit.org for the list of supporters and the cost savings model). This would simply be an extension to what a lot of the large health plans ALREADY issue (ie, UnitedHealthcare and Humana). Please do not misrepresent this effort as it had enjoyed broad bi-partisan support…and was included in the Republican health reform alternative legislation introduced earlier in this congress.